are creationists from Venus?A TV programme about Comet ISON reminds me about recent news of the "Black Beauty" meteorite. This is said to have come from Mars and to be - well, very old.Now creationists - including the geologists and palaeontologists among them - will of course deny the great age, but do they accept that there are some meteorites on Earth that have come from Mars? What do creationist astronomers make of such objects?Just asking.

Thanks Ashley. It seems, then, that they have no problems with the origin of the meteorites from Mars but dispute, inevitably, their age. However the age determination is based on cosmic ray exposure, so that's a whole new set of reactions to be denied. It seems that by these measurements it can be determined that the meteors spent a considerable time making their way from Mars to Earth. Time additional to that spent (allegedly, then, less than 6000 years) as part of Mars waiting to be blasted into space. I've only glanced at the dating paper linked below and haven't seen the answer to my next question: what trajectory have these meteorites taken? The time they were exposed to cosmic rays is reckoned to be vastly greater than 6000 years and suggests they were orbiting the sun many, many times. To have got here in under 6000 years, they must have had a very different trajectory. Even if we exclude the need to pop out to the source of the cosmic rays for a quick microwaving and back again, the creationists need an alternative hypothesis as to how they came to be here.Has anyone come across such? http://www.lpi.usra.edu/books/MESSII/9004.pdfIt does, by the way, put the transit time of Lunar meteorites in the region of hundreds of thousands of years - and that's just for a short hop.

I expect inventive YECs will come up with a Flood catastrophism model that explains the cosmic ray evidence suggestive of great age and/or a slow indirect journey through space. Something to do with the meteorites arriving after Noah's Flood but being blasted with excess cosmic rays when on Mars (with its currently very thin atmosphere) and/or during a surprisingly short hop across space to Earth. All due to Noah's Flood and its wide-ranging after-effects (perhaps the pre-Flood conditions in outer space also). Perhaps 'vastly accelerated past radioactive decay rates' triggered stronger cosmic rays. Though YECs require less carbon 14 than now post-Flood for their models, and atmospheric carbon 14 is produced by cosmic rays hitting nitrogen atoms - but 'doubtless' Earth's atmosphere was 'much' thicker than now up until shortly after the Flood (accounting for giant dragonflies and so forth). So it all sort of makes sense.

The new model (I assume it does not currently exist somewhere) will probably be peer-reviewed in the Answers Research Journal.

EDIT: sorry, I think they would require a THINNER atmosphere in the past. So back to the drawing board perhaps.

Last edited by a_haworthroberts on Mon Nov 25, 2013 3:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

As for comets, they 'can't' come from any hypothetical Oort Cloud (trillions of miles from the Sun) because they simply could not arrive anywhere near Earth in just 6,000 years! So ISON must previously have been 'lurking' much closer to the Sun than naturalistic science assumes. Despite its trajectory.

Well well well! Snelling not only trots out the massively changed radioactive decay rates over the past 6000 years but he does so unnecessarily. Unnecessary because he makes it clear that he subscribes to the Omphalos argument: that God created the universe including the appearance of age:

First, when God created the earth and Mars complete with their crust, mantle and core structures, there is no reason not to expect that He created all the isotopes of all the elements in the first Martian and earth crustal rocks. In other words, He not only created all the parent U isotopes, He also created the daughter Pb isotopes in the zircons in the first crustal rocks. So all the quantities of Pb isotopes these investigators measured today were not derived from radioactive decay of U, contrary to the assumption made by these investigators.

So in church this morning, Snelling may well be singing "Guide Me o Thou Great Deceiver."